Blogging Pedagogy

Beware: Long and self-righteous ranting will ensue

1) Classroom Beginnings - Like Jim, I'm really excited at the possibilities of these social networking tools and their use in the classroom. I first beganventuring into MySpace / Facebook over a year ago when teaching my RHE 309 (Rhetoric Surrounding the American Workplace) and we began having classroom discussions about employers, employees, and self representation in online settings. Because I was unsure how I wanted to proceed with these conversations, I always copped out and pulled up MySpace pages of current students' roommates. Public, searchable by name, and yet the person was not in the classroom. This activity of analyzing a page both visually and by close reading the narratives seemed to be enough to scare my students into realizing the potential for disaster when making these pages public, yet we did not have to enter into the realm of potentially shaming a student (I had several students offer their pages for public analysis, but I declined seeing as how I have a strict MySpace / Facebook rule for students: I refuse to look at their pages because I have a difficult time separating page from student - I would never want to unfairly judge, condemn, or protect a student because of my "interactions" with them on the internet).

2) My Personal MySpace - This activity spiraled into my own interactions with the sites (MySpace specifically). Yes, I am an active MySpace user and a firm believer that these sites do inform, in major ways, the actions of a particular demographic(middle class, white, fairly educated, 16-28(?) year olds).

Case in point: people who become active in MySpace more than likely carry their cameras around more than they used to in the hopes of capturing that perfect picture not for future reference, but for instant and PUBLIC gratification. Pictures aren't just pictures -- pictures become, for some of us, "potential MySpace shots." Songs we hear that pique our interests could be our next profile song. There really is a language for creating these personal narratives and the ways in which people navigate this world is quite sophistocated (I am *not* including myself in this sophistocation).

It's my interest in this way of thinking, this cultural navigation, that led me to develop the MySpace / Facebook framework for discussing characters in literary texts. When not in a computer classroom where we can easily and physically create the sites, I actually draw up the MySpace schema on the chalk board (yes, I replicate a computer screen in chalk) and my students and I fill out the categories. This activity isn't just an attempt to make learning cool or sexy - I firmly believe, and will consider staking my life on the fact, that as the means for self-representation shift or even grow, so do the ways our students think about themselves and others (I do include myself in this). Their (my) social lives are becoming broken up into "About me," "Who I'd Like to Meet," "General Interests," "Education" and public commenting on "walls." They are SO EFFECTIVE in thinking about themselves in this way that making them break down characters and discussing what OTHERS would say about characters really fits into the way in which they communicate. If you don't believe me, start doing your own research.

That said, I think one of the dangers of using these sites in the classroom is the potential distance from the community that some instructors might have. I think activities involving analysis of student sites might run the risk of being really removed from the MySpace / Facebook cultural conversation. Looking at these spaces to automatically condemn is not a productive argument nor is it good pedagogy - I think the only way those of us who want to participate and use this technology AND communicative framework is responsibly.

Yes, I have a political stance on MySpace / Facebook. I think those people who don't at least attempt to understand what is going on and simply refer to these sites as "stupid," "dangerous," "slutty," "self serving," or "embarrassing" should shut the hell up until they can justify their arguments. I think there is a lot of naivete from those who do not participate or understand how these sites are being used and I really encourage everyone to sufficiently dabble before pass judgement.

3) Nate's Ambush - I had the great honor of being invited to sit in on one of Nate's Notorious Ambushes. I had publicly expressed my reservations with this presentation and Nate asked me to watch one if I was going to keep running my mouth. In all honesty, I was TOTALLY uncomfortable with the idea of projecting images of students from their sites onto a big screen to have a "high stakes" confrontation. However, the way Nate does this presentation and the way I imagined it are entirely different:

At the end of his (really good) visual rhetoric presentation, Nate flashes up several screens of students from the course from their Facebook pages - these pictures are NOT individual pictures, they are all placed together, and he alternates in between the screens quite quickly. It was a LOT less horrific than I imagined and the students, for the most part, got a pretty huge kick out of it. Some get obviously embarrassed - some clearly get off on the attention.

My general feeling is that I don't really have much of a problem with Nate's presentation as is. He's navigating the pictures and the classroom space responsibly and going out of his way to respect students within his potentially disrespectful presentation of their social lives.

Yet I think this activity, in the hands of the wrong person, is still a horrible idea. If this is something we are going to promote with our colleagues or advertise as an effective teaching tool, it must be clear that context indeed matters: to ever place a student's embarrassing MySpace / Facebook photo alone on a screen asking for an entire classroom to gawk or criticize is not high stakes - it's humiliation, it's confrontational, and I would venture to say it's total harrassment (and based on the nature of some of the photos, sexual harrassment). It's the implication of a group, of an entire demographic, that makes Nate's presentation effective and I think he's gone out of his way to frame it as such.

That said, I would never do it. To seek out these photos, even for pedagogical purposes, breaks my rule - their spaces are their spaces not because they have a right for them to be their spaces (they ARE public) but because I want them to be their spaces. I protect myself by not entering into that part of their life the same way I protect them from not entering into MY private life (I also will not accept friend requests from students who are actively in the process of receiving a grade from me - I send them a nice note telling them when the semester's over, I'd be glad to be their MySpace / Facebook friend). Even though I hope my kids learn how important it is to comport oneself publicly in respectable and professional ways and that the world won't bite them in the ass, I hope that they will learn this from the example I set - the way I speak, speak to issues, dress, have my social networking profiles set to private, and the way in which I place a huge value on respect and communication in the classroom. The rest, I've decided, is not my territory - not because it shouldn't be, but because I choose for it not to be.

I think that's the important lesson here: it IS a choice. There are consequences - Nate might make students uncomfortable, I might fail mine in the future for not making a high stakes confrontation in terms of Facebook. But we've made our choices in very sincere ways and I think that's the most important thing we can do.

Here are some of the reactions of john's students:

http://instructors.cwrl.utexas.edu/jjones/?q=node/220